October 10 (SeeNews) - Bulgarian telecoms services and Internet provider Nexcom plans to turn to profit in 2008 on the back of a two-fold rise in revenues to some $10 million (7.1 million euro), the company's CEO said on Wednesday.
“We expect a small loss in 2007 due to the investments in WiMax network expansion […] but we plan to turn to profit in 2008,” the company’s CEO Emil Nikolov told reporters, adding that Nexcom’s revenues for 2007 are estimated at about $5.0 million.
Nexcom said it will invest some 20 million euro in deploying its WiMAX network by the end of 2009, planning to cover over 85% of Bulgaria's population of 7.7 million people. The company won a 10-year licence for a national WiMAX frequency in 2005.
Nexcom will also aim to grab around 10% of the fixed-line telecommunications market in Bulgaria, after it overcomes the last-mile hurdle set by the dominant fixed-line operator in the country, BTC, Nikolov said. BTC, which owns the last-mile cable linking the technology infrastructure of the switching station to the consumer at home, still has 95% of households as its subscribers.
In September Polish financial group MCI Management said it bought a 31.6% stake in Nexcom for $5.0 million. U.S. investment fund Intel Capital also bought a minority share for undisclosed sum.
Nexcom ( www.nexcom.bg ), set up in 1998 by U.S. Nexcom Telecommunications to provide Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, is one of the largest of around 20 operators offering an alternative to dominant fixed-line telecoms operator BTC.
WiMAX is a standards-based wireless technology that provides high-throughput broadband connections over long distances, for transmission in the 3.4-3.6 gigahertz (GHz) frequency band that can handle Internet, video, voice or data transmission at speed ranging from 128 kilobits per second to 34 megabits per second. The main advantage of that kind of wireless networks is the opportunity to offer high-quality data transmission to places where the installation of fibre-optic cables is economically inefficient or unfeasible.
($=0.7073 euro)